Gadgetory

so this is blackberry key too and it might just be one of the most convenient phones I have ever used where this phone is incredibly convenient it is also incredibly polarizing if you didn't notice there's a full QWERTY keyboard slotted into the front of this phone and this is probably the most polarizing part of this device this keyboard gives this phone a lot of really convenient features but I'm honestly still learning how to type like this again now the keys are 20% larger than they were on the BlackBerry key1 and while that helps a little bit you're gonna have to decide if you're willing to fundamentally change the way you type on your phone but let's take it back to convenience for a second now there are 35 keys on this keyboard and almost every single one of them is remappable this means that you can set actions like launching apps sending messages or a multitude of other things that you would want to do with a single tap you can also set different actions for short presses and long presses so you have over 50 different actions that you can do right from the home screen all these actions only previously worked from the home screen in the BlackBerry key one BlackBerry decided to add a new key called the speed key which allows you to use these actions from different apps now I can jump from slack to Twitter to whatever other app I want to just by pressing the speed key and then the hot key on the keyboard this is an incredibly convenient and has pretty much changed the way I work on my phone the speak he also gives you the option of using these actions if you're using a custom launcher like Nova because that didn't actually work before there's also another remappable key on the side of the phone called the convenience key this key is really just made to be remapped to whatever you want and I set it to Google assistant because I really liked the squeeze feature on the pixel to this phone was essentially made for multitasking but you're probably wondering if it can actually hold up the BlackBerry key one had a huge issue where the three gigabytes of RAM wasn't quite enough to multitask the way you probably wanted to but break u2 has been upgraded to six gigabytes of RAM which is doing a lot better on a daily basis this is paired with a qualcomm snapdragon 616 processor and 64 gigabytes of storage and while those aren't the highest specs available on the market right now it's still held up pretty well oh and if you wanted more storage than those 64 gigabytes this phone does support expandable storage up to 2 terabytes assuming you can find a microSD card of that capacity all these components are powered by a 3500 milliamp hour battery and that can lead to some really serious battery life my coworker Jimmy westenberg and I got about 6 to 7 hours of screen on time out of this phone and while that's not exactly the 2 day battery life that BlackBerry was touting it's still pretty darn good for a smart phone the phone can charge pretty quickly too it's using Qualcomm quick charge 3.0 technology so while it's not up to date with quick charge for you actually get the option of turning on boost mode when you plug it in which limits background processes to help it charge a little bit faster overall I really like the size of this phone the entire chassis is a little under 6 inches which is pretty much the size of most screens these days the actual screen is only about 4.5 inches though so you're probably gonna have to get used to using a screen that small also having that keyboard below the screen does make it a little hard to pull down the notification shade you can actually remap the currency keys so it pulls down the notification shade for you the only time I really found the screen size to be an issue was when I was trying to watch a lot of content on this phone especially since some of my favorite content creators shoot in a widescreen format it'll take a little getting used to to start watching content on a 4.5 inch screen instead of a 6-inch one but that's the trade-off you're gonna have to make if you want that physical keyboard overall though the image quality on this phone is awesome is using a 16 20 by 1080 IPS panel so it's not OLED like a lot of the phones on the market right now but it still looks really great colors are bright and saturated and it's gonna seem more like something you'd see on a computer monitor rather than a phone now this panel technology does have a few trade-offs versus an OLED since I can't individual pixels and it's going to use a little more energy but LEDs are still really expensive and the market is still controlled by one or two manufacturers speakers in the bottom of the phones sound okay but they're really nothing special in fact only one of these girls in the bottom is actually a speaker and that's kind of annoying since you can cover them up pretty easily blackberry did include a headphone jack in the top of this phone though so you can always wear some headphones if you want to get a more stereo experience the back of the phone is housing dual 12 megapixel sensors and I was really surprised with the image quality of this thing colors are bright and punchy in the detail and dynamic range were awesome secondary lens is a 2x telephoto sensor too and I always love to see this when there are dual cameras the sensor is also used for portrait mode and it actually ended up being really good it was almost as good is the pixel twos and it was definitely better than a lot of the other flagships on the market right now unfortunately the low-light performance of the camera on this phone is not so good it seems to drop the shutter speed pretty significantly when you're in a low-light circumstance and that can lead to some really blurry images so there isn't any optical stabilization in these lenses but blackberry says they're using enhanced electronic image stabilization to make your image a lot more stable I decided to test this in the downtown streets of San Francisco so I'm gonna play a little clip and you can decide for yourself whether or not it's good enough okay but in the end this is still a phone and even more importantly this is a blackberry so how does the qual quality actually hold up on this thing I tested this over a few days and I didn't have any dropped calls and the call quality seemed really good the biggest issue that I had here had to do with the proximity sensor whenever I was on a call the proximity sensor didn't really seem to realize that I was on a call and my cheekbone kept hitting the mute button during my conversation this led to the other person thinking that I've kept hanging up on them and this happened multiple times every single time I made a call this is a pretty big issue and I know that a lot of people use headphones when they're on calls but I think that Blackberry probably needs to fix this sooner rather than later the buck Reiki 2 is running on Android 8.1 and their approach to software is really simplistic it's basically just stock Android with a few tweaks and a few extra apps and I think these are all really well thought out things like blackberry hub allow you to access all of your messages from pretty much every messaging platform in one app and as soon as you tap on it it'll open the app and show you the message this up in particular had a lot of issues on the BlackBerry key one mostly due to that 3 gigabytes of RAM but I didn't really see any lag here now the only thing that I would worry about what the software is updates the BlackBerry key one was notorious for not getting that many updates after it was released and I really hope that TCL does a better job to update this phone now a couple other little things to know about this phone but there's no wireless charging or water resistance on this thing I don't use wireless charging that much so it's not that important to me but I know a lot of people who do so just be aware of that the BlackBerry key - is gonna run you 649 dollars and I have some mixed feelings about that price point that's $100 more than the BlackBerry key one was it launched and it's actually $20 more than the highest end of one plus 6 with a snapdragon 845 a gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage at $549 I'd probably recommend this phone to heavy multitaskers pretty instantly where $100 more though it's a little hard to automatically recommend this I still really like this phone though and I am considering picking it up myself it's just for a really niche subset of users so that's been the BlackBerry key - if you have any questions that you didn't see answered here reach out to any of us across all of our social networks because of course we are your source for all things Android